"Explaining binary search to a cop" should've caught on as a saying tbh.
I forgot about the context to this. God this is so funny
Image description: screenshot of two paragraphs that read, "Afterward I found a chat room thread among Cambridge computer scientists, one of whom had also been told that unless he could pin down the moment of the theft no one would look at the footage. He said he tried to explain sorting algorithms to police - he was a computer scientist, after all.
"You don't search the whole thing, he said. You use a binary search. You fast forward to halfway, see if the bike is there and, if it is, zoom to three quarters of the way through. But if it isn't there at the halfway mark, you rewind to a quarter of the way through. It's very quick. In fact, he had pointed out, if the CCTV footage stretched back to the dawn of humanity it would still probably have only taken an hour to find the moment of the theft. This argument didn't go down well."
